Highly readable book details how to invest

Dr Jan Tibamwenda starts his highly readable book by throwing down the challenge. 

“If you were born poor, it is not your fault, but if you die poor, it is your choice,” he writes. 
It sounds like madness, right? Well, let’s see. Immediately, thereupon, the reader is drawn into an oasis of financial literacy prompts and pointers. The author came to this conclusion that dying poor is a choice after he witnessed a union of rural women appearing on television to talk about their savings to the tune of Shs50m. 

They had rustled up that amount from selling the surplus of their subsistence crops over the course of the year. Wide-eyed and self-congratulatory, women said they would spend the Shs50m on a Christmas party. This is when the author realised that the surplus value of their crops could have been parlayed into savings and investments, which would feather their nests as their finances took flight to wealth and prosperity.  Instead, the women chose to splurge their earnings on what could not be ploughed back into a profit: a Christmas party. The author thus decided to examine this socio-economic phenomenon of Ugandans spending what they do not have on what they do not need as they are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty. 

Money as an asset
However, before he came up with his own remedy for this social ailment, as it were, he went through the furnace of financial setbacks of a similar kind. 
“This reminds me of what I experienced when I was a student in the Netherlands. A friend who was European, from a very rich family, invited me to his wedding reception that was held at a high profile restaurant. As usual, food and beverages were plenty and each one of us was free to order whatever he wanted. In our characteristic African style where we are used to free things at receptions, I did justice to the drinks. At the end of the reception, each one of us was given a bill for the food and drinks he had consumed. My bill was, as expected, big. When I saw each person getting money from his pocket and paying for what he had consumed, I nearly got a heart attack,” he recalls.

 “The idea of having to pay my student’s per diem made me restless. I pretended to smile, but the muscles on my face rebelled. The face could only produce a smile that was a mixture of smiling, crying and stupidity,” the author writes, rather comically. 
At that point, he exited his initial gloom at almost going broke by going for broke at the bar of the wedding reception and slowly realised that frugality was key. If a rich European family was watching its pennies so their pounds could take care of themselves, who was he, a poor African student, to not do the same? 

Instead of closing his eyes and ponying up a small fortune on conspicuous consumption, the author realised that cash is an asset. It can be invested in a money-generating venture such as treasury bonds and this can generate more money in form of interest. So instead of spending your money on frivolities, why not grow it by investing it, hereby getting profits or dividends therefrom? 

Mind the company you keep
Becoming rich is not just a process, it is a way of life. So you must associate with success-minded or successful people in order for their habits to influence you to become like-minded and like-pocketed. 
The author shares how the late Hajji Nasser Ntege Ssebagala opened the first supermarket in Uganda called Ugantico. 
At the time, Captain Mike Mukula was Ssebagala’s driver and because of his hardwork, the Ssebagala family bankrolled his studies in the USA and this is how he became a pilot. Today, Mike Mukula is a wealthy man. Not least because of his association with Ssebagala and how this association rubbed off on him to expand his own bottom line.

Knowledge is key
Having financial knowledge of capital accumulation gleaned from private study or school should put you in good stead to make money and become rich. The author gives the example of how farmers in Mukono and Masaka districts, from 2002 to 2005, used their knowledge in what was happening in Madagascar, one of the leading producers of vanilla, to grow their own wealth. 

At a glance. 
Becoming rich is not just a process, it is a way of life. So you must associate with success-minded or successful people in order for their habits to influence you to become like-minded and like-pocketed.